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FREEMAN: Colossal beauty.
Awe-inspiring intricacy.
Are the wonders of our universe a cosmic accident or the result of intelligent design? For centuries, religion and science were bitter foes.
Now science actively searches for our creator.
Some physicists think he's hidden in the math.
Neurologists think she might be in our brains.
And computer coders believe God is one of them and that our world is nothing more than his simulation.
Space, time, life itself.
The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
Every culture claims a God, an all-powerful entity that created the world and directs our fate.
But why do we share this belief in a cosmic creator? Did we dream it up to serve a need in our psyche or culture? Is God really out there? Up there? This is a journey into the science of God.
I promise you, it's quite a trip.
Some of what we'll find almost defies belief.
Sometime in the early '70s, I bought my daughter an ant farm.
She soon got bored, but not me.

I was memorized by this little menagerie squeezed between two panes of glass.
And I wondered, what could they ever know about me, the one who built their world? What can we ever learn about who or what created us, stranded as we are in this colony of humanity? For as long as scientists have struggled to understand our place in the universe, there have been those who've hoped to get a glimpse of God.
astronomer Galileo Galilei had a groundbreaking insight.
Nature's grand book is written in the language of mathematics.
From that time to this, scientific geniuses like Newton and Einstein used math to dig deep into the workings of nature, to search for God through the equations that defined the laws of physics.

The latest mind hoping to join these illustrious ranks is Garrett Lisi.
LISl: The universe can very successfully be described mathematically.
You have to imagine how the world's working in a certain circumstance and then use reason and mathematics to develop a description of how that might be happening.
But it's imagination that breaks the trail before reason enters.
FREEMAN: After earning his PhD, Garrett escaped the confines of academia in search of adventure and a space in which to think.
LISl: Rather than go into a normal academic-track job, I just split off for Maui, became a surf bum, and did the research I wanted to.
Mostly spent time doing physics research and surfing.

FREEMAN: But all of our attempts to understand nature so far have been fragmentary.
There's one set of rules for tiny atoms, another for giant objects like stars and galaxies.
And the two sets of math don't fit together.
What physicists like Lisi seek is a single, overarching theory, a mathematical design that explains everything.
Garrett thinks he may at last have found this theory of everything.
And if he's right, God could be one heck of a mathematician.
Garrett's work is at a leading edge of physics.
Before we plunge into this mind-bending math, we first need to back up a bit.
Because it's possible there's already evidence for a creator in the math.
Andy Albrecht is a leading cosmologist.
Hello.
How are you? FREEMAN: He's also a renowned chocoholic.
I'll have the chocolate souffle and a latte.

FREEMAN: Just as a perfect chocolate souffle relies on a precise mixture of ingredients baked at a specific temperature for an exact time, so our universe looks the way it does because of a precise balance between four fundamental forces.
The four forces we know and love in the world around us are gravity, electromagnetism those you've probably heard of then there's also the weak force and the strong force.
They're a little bit more specialized but absolutely essential to make the world work the way it does.
Gravity, in many ways, is the force we know first.
We try to walk, and we fall down.
That's because of gravity.
When you carry something a little too heavy and it falls, it's because of gravity.
Electromagnetism tells us how the chemistry works.
When you cook something, the energy you use is ultimately electromagnetic energy.
Weak force is about a billion times less strong than electromagnetism.
And it's responsible for radioactivity.